The NY Times and Senator Cotton - Updated

Update 6/19/2020 12:39 pm: At Commonweal, Paul Baumann has weighed in.  His take? "The reaction to Cotton’s ill-conceived essay is not just a step on the slippery slope to intellectual conformity. It is illiberalism, full stop."

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New York Times staffers rose in protest over an editorial decision.  They got the editorial page editor fired.  Were they right?

On Monday, May 25, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on the neck of George Floyd until he was dead.  Public outrage grew swiftly.  By the following weekend, large protests took place in many cities across America.  That same weekend, especially after nightfall on Saturday, May 30, the protesters, nearly all of whom marched peacefully, were joined by others who engaged in unruliness and mayhem, including the looting of many stores, the burning of some vehicles and buildings, and the engaging in violence against police who were arrayed in force.

My impression is that some police departments fared better than others in controlling the lawbreaking that weekend.  In my local city, Chicago, rampant looting and some violence took place that weekend, much of it captured by cameras and streamed live.  The police and the mayor were heavily criticized for allowing the criminal behavior to get out of control.  But thereafter the police seemingly took a more assertive stance against lawbreaking, and the looting, violence and burning have been virtually non-existent during the various protest events which have continued daily in Chicago.  But for a few days at the end of May and beginning of June, the street battles between police and unruly citizens, as well as the looting and burning, competed with protest stories for front-page headlines.

On Wednesday, June 3, in the wake of that eventful weekend, the New York Times published a guest opinion article written by Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK).  This report card ranked Cotton as the third most conservative member of the United States Senate in 2018.  Cotton's article dwelt on the lawbreaking during protests.  After taking a few partisan shots at the liberal politicians who are in charge of most large cities in the US, Cotton called for the US military to be deployed to supplement the police, justifying it on the basis of a law, the Insurrection Act, which dates back to the presidency of Thomas Jefferson.  According to its Wikipedia page, the Act has been used by presidents over the years to put down Native American uprisings and quell labor unrest.  More recently, President George HW Bush invoked the law in the early 1990s to bring the Los Angeles riots under control in the wake of Rodney King's beating at the hands of LA police.

When the Cotton opinion piece appeared, some reporters and staff members of the newspaper reacted angrily.  As reported by NY Times media columnist Ben Smith, who seems to have done some terrific work since joining the paper,

Times staff members began an extraordinary campaign to publicly denounce the Op-Ed article written by Senator Cotton. Members of an internal group called Black@NYT organized the effort in a new Slack channel and agreed on a carefully drafted response. They would say that Mr. Cotton’s column “endangered” black staff members, a choice of words intended to “focus on the work” and “avoid being construed as hyperpartisan,” one said. On Wednesday evening around 7:30, hours after the column was posted, Times employees began tweeting a screenshot of Mr. Cotton’s essay, most with some version of the sentence: “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.” 

NY Times employees sent the publisher a letter, reportedly signed by over 1,000 employees, claiming that Cotton's letter contained various inaccuracies, and listing the following demands:

-- A commitment to the thorough vetting, fact-checking, and real-time rebuttal of Opinion pieces, including seeking perspective and debate from across the desk's diverse staff before publication.
 -- An editor's note — or ideally, a fully reported follow-up — examining the facts of Cotton's Op-Ed.
-- A commitment that Cotton's Op-Ed not appear in any future print edition.
-- Staff shortages on the Community team should be addressed immediately, as readers need an opportunity to express themselves. 

Here is Smith's report of what ensued:

The protest worked: The paper veered into internal crisis, and the publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, decided he could not continue with Mr. [James] Bennet running the Opinion section, which had repeatedly stumbled in ways that infuriated the newsroom.
Mr. Bennet acknowledged that he had not read the Op-Ed before it was published, which people at all levels of the Times saw as a damning admission. He said in a virtual meeting with nearly 4,000 Times staff members on Friday that he had long believed that for “ideas and even dangerous ideas, that the right thing to do is expose them on our platform to public scrutiny and debate, and that’s the best way, that even dangerous ideas can be discarded.” But, he said, he was now asking himself, “Is that right?” (Mr. Bennet declined to discuss the situation further with me.)
At the same meeting, Times executives thanked staff members for their public outrage, and later that day published an editor’s note atop Mr. Cotton’s article, saying that it contained allegations that “have not been substantiated,” its tone was “needlessly harsh” and that it should not have been published.

The entire episode at the newspaper has stirred controversy.  Here is the take of one of its columnists, Bret Stephens:

Last week’s decision by this newspaper to disavow an Op-Ed by Senator Tom Cotton is a gift to the enemies of a free press — free in the sense of one that doesn’t quiver and cave in the face of an outrage mob. It is a violation of the principles that are supposed to sustain the profession, particularly our obligation to give readers a picture of the world as it really is.
And, as the paper dismisses distinguished journalists along with controversial opinions, it’s an invitation to intellectual cowardice.
[...]
I don’t agree with Cotton’s view. I know of nobody at The Times who agrees with it. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page doesn’t agree with it. Ditto for much of the mainstream media, at least its more liberal precincts.
Then again, isn’t this the biggest problem these outlets have faced in recent years — being of a single mind on subjects that sharply divide the nation? Isn’t that how we got into trouble in 2016, with our rock-solid belief that Donald Trump couldn’t possibly win?

My views are straightforward.  No matter how hard I squint or how much I rotate the paper, I'm not able to discern any threats of violence or intimidation in Cotton's article.  The NY Times' leadership let the inmates run the asylum for a time a couple of weeks ago, and that is unfortunate for journalism.  If I want to read items that are devoid of editorial judgment, I'll follow the president's tweets.  Ultimately, I think Stephens has it right when he writes,

Who, after all, has gained the most from the turmoil at The Times? That would be Tom Cotton, who first got the benefit of a public furor that helped make his piece the most read Op-Ed in The Times last week — and then got to pose as a tribune of free speech against the censorious leftists and stampeded editors at the “Fake News.”
If that’s a victory for Cotton’s ideological opponents, I wonder what defeat looks like.